I read a “review copy” of The Daughters of Freya and found it an interesting experience. DoF isn’t usually performed for its readers simultaneously, as are email narratives such as Blue Company. Instead, usually any individual who signs up starts getting messages shortly after registering, which might make it seem more like Online Caroline in its approach. But — unlike Online Caroline in which you seem to be getting normal email messages from Caroline, with normal headers, today’s date, etc. — DoF doesn’t actually create a correspondence between the messages you receive and the messages characters send. A single message you receive might contain several messages from different characters, and the dates of the messages are driven by the story (which, in my reading, took place during a different time of year than my reading).

The result made me realize that there were more types of email narratives than I’d considered. DoF wasn’t trying to create the feeling of corresponding via email with a fictional character, nor of voyeuristically listening in on the email correspondence of others. Instead, it was using email to (a) change the context of reading and (b) build suspense.

Drunken Boat, http://www.drunkenboat.com, international online journal for the arts, announces its First Annual Panliterary Awards in Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Web-Art, Photo/Video, Sound. Submit up to three works, either via email to panlitawards@drunkenboat.com or via physical mail to: Drunken Boat, 119 Main St., Chester, CT 06412. A $15 entry fee must accompany all submissions, either via check or money order, else submitted electronically at: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db7/donate.html. Winners in all categories will be featured in a subsequent issue of Drunken Boat, and will be invited to perform at future multimedia events and performances. All other entries will be considered for publication.

July 27, 2005

An Invitation to Poetry
Book and DVD
Edited by Robert Pinsky & Maggie Dietz
W.W. Norton and Company
2004

Watching and reading from some compelling multimedia poetry collections has gotten me thinking about their different approaches. The two Poetry in Motion CD-ROMs espouse a very different view of poetry and its place in culture than does An Invitation to Poetry, and this difference seems more interesting than the differences in interface, format, and publication dates.

Now, I say “very different,” but of course even the most radically different poets actually agree on a lot when it comes to language and poetry: it should be pleasing in its sound, its meaning, and the interplay between these; in general a poem manifests itself on the page, in the voice, and in the mind. It should work to do things that the newspaper does not. If you’re going to throw open the doors to every possible perspective on language and include, say, Joseph Goebbels, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Rove, then we’d have to say that poets are all pretty much allies – it would hardly be worth noting the differences even between poets of very different stripes, such as Derek Walcott and Amiri Baraka.

But, from a standpoint within poetry, these collections of texts and videos are indeed quite different. The poets documented by Ron Mann posit an image of poet as performer, physically present and supplying the expert voice that is uniquely qualified to utter the poem. Pinsky and Dietz, on the other hand, actually don’t even include the poets in their videos.

Are there any tech-savvy volunteers out there able to record and make a Quicktime movie of the show? (I don’t pay enough money per month to Comcast to get access to G4; plus, it’d be nice to have a digitized version of the episode for the archives.) Any help would be much appreciated!

July 26, 2005

Acting on a tip from Stephanie Strickland, I’ve been reading Florian Cramer’s Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, a PDF book that is an impressively broad compendium of creative uses of code, stretching back deep into pre-computer times. It’s well worth checking out for those interested in the history of computational art.

Near the beginning, though, Cramer repeats a confusion that I’ve seen hinted at elsewhere. Although it doesn’t end up being important to the book, this point confuses clarity with obscurity and secrecy, so I thought I’d take the excuse to pick this nit before the infestation becomes more widespread:

As speculative codes, Egyptian hieroglyphs (in their two different historical readings), the Voynich Manuscript and Travis Dane’s CD-ROM render “code” ambiguous between its traditional meaning of a cryptographic code, i.e. a rule for transforming symbols into other symbols, and code in its computational meaning of a transformation rule for symbols into action. Ever since computer programmers referred to written algorithmic machine instructions as “code” and programming as “coding,” “code” not only refers to cryptographic codes, but to what makes up software … (p. 9)

July 22, 2005

I just finished reading a fantasy novella titled The Archer’s Flight. As the book’s introduction notes, it was the result of an unusual process:

It was serialized, appearing in seventeen chapters over a year’s time, but that’s not what’s unusual about it. It was published on the Web, but that’s not the unusual part either. What is unusual (and as far as I know, unique) is that this story’s readers chose the actions of its main character. Each published chapter ended in some dilemma for the protagonist, Deica; the audience collectively decided what she would do (via posting and voting on a web site), and their decision led to the next chapter. This was not a group of writers offering advice on what would make the best story; rather, the readers took on Deica’s role, as they would in improvisational theater or a roleplaying-type game. They decided what they would do if they were her.

Mark Keavney is both the author of The Archer’s Flight and the originator of the method used for its creation. He calls this method “storygaming” and describes it in detail in his essay “The City of IF Story.”

“Absolutely not,” say Grand Text Auto executives. Bloggers at the popular site have categorically denied that, with the aid of a program freely available on the Internet, “secret content” can be unlocked and the blog can be revealed as being laced with sex and obscenity. The sharp reply came after the Entertainment Blog Rating Board, at the behest of Senator Hillary Clinton, issued a ruling revoking Grand Text Auto’s previously awarded rating of “serious hypertext.”

July 21, 2005

Last week I wrote about my interest in reading processes (and discussed Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice). Today, in the same vein, I’d like to discuss a rather different book: Charles O. Hartman’s Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996).

Hartman’s book is presented as a memoir — in which the author reflects on his experiments, as a poet and teacher, with computers. These include assembling his own Sinclair ZX81, designing new computer programs used in the process of composing poetry, employing a famous text generation program created by others, and implementing a program for performing (and student learning of) scansion for poems in iambic and anapestic feet. Hartman continues this work, a decade later, and in fact his scansion program is now available in a new version (Scandroid 1.1) which is GPLed, written in Python, and certified by the Open Source Initiative.

Early in Virtual Muse Hartman tells us of his poetic experiment for the ZX81, a BASIC program called RanLines that stored 20 lines in an internal array and then retrieved one randomly each time the user pressed a key. This sort of random arrangement of fixed possibilities is a common first experiment for those considering combinatory poetry. What Hartman offers in Virtual Muse, however, is an unusual attempt to think through this sort of randomness (chapter 3).

July 20, 2005

I thought I’d link to a few dissertations that have been published recently that may be of interest to GTxA readers. Perfect for a summer read on the beach with your laptop, right? Here are excerpts from their abstracts.

Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and Character (pdf), by Mark Riedl, North Carolina State University
In this dissertation, I explore the use of search-based planning as a technique for generating stories that demonstrate both strong plot coherence and strong character believability. First, I describe an extension to search-based planning that reasons about character intentions by identifying possible character goals that explain their actions in a plan and creates plan structure that explains why those characters commit to their goals. Second, I describe how a character personality model can be incorporated into planning in a way that guides the planner to choose consistent character behavior without strictly preventing characters from acting “out of character” when necessary. Finally, I present an open-world planning algorithm that extends the capabilities of conventional planning algorithms in order to support a process of story creation modeled after the process of dramatic authoring used by human authors.

This is a preview of New Dissertations on AI-Based Interactive Art, Character and Narrative. Read the full post.

July 15, 2005

Today, in that vein, I’m sharing some thoughts from reading Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991). Given its subtitle, you’d think I would have read Perloff’s book a decade ago. But I just picked it up for the first time this summer. In part this is because Perloff’s focus is primarily on writing in a media-saturated culture, rather than writing which employs media other than traditional print (though a number of such examples are considered). As it turns out, I found that Perloff’s book has much to offer someone coming from a perspective such as mine. In particular, her focus on the procedural work of John Cage is of interest. In fact, while Cage is more often mentioned in connection with music than poetry, as Perloff notes in her preface (p. xiii) Radical Artifice is a book about poetry “written, so to speak, under his sign.”

July 14, 2005

Part of the argument for procedural literacy (Michael’s article,my reply) is that we must learn to “read processes.” That is, we must learn to interpret the operations of systems… not just the outputs. There are a number of reasons for this, a few of which I’ll briefly sketch here.

First, as Ted Nelson began arguing in the 1970s, we’re living in a world increasingly defined by processes — processes designed and implemented by humans. These processes can be designed poorly, or implemented poorly, or designed and implemented to help some people and make life difficult for others… but this is the fault of humans, and it can be corrected (and sooner rather than later, if we can learn to spot bad designs before they’re widely adopted). To put it another way, “the computer just works that way” is a non-argument. The importance of this knowledge lay behind Nelson’s now-famous cry from the front of Computer Lib / Dream Machines: “You can and must understand computers NOW.”

Second, more specifically, we’re entering a period in which the results of computational processes are increasingly used to form assumptions or offered as evidence. This is one thing if we’re forming our assumptions about whether the weekend will be sunny while we’re trying to decide whether to have a picnic — but the results of computer simulations are also increasingly used when we’re in the process of trying to make more weighty decisions about matters such as city planning and greenhouse gas emissions. To take one of my favorite examples, Jay Forrester’s urban dynamics simulations (which inspired SimCity) can be used to try to figure out how to build a healthy city, but we need to view any results from his work through an interpretation of the structures and processes of the simulations — which Garn and others have argued are deeply flawed (for example, by their cities’ lack of dynamic interaction with suburbs).

More frolicking with robots — here’s an amusing NYTimes article on living with a 15-inch-tall walking, seeing, listening robot named Nuvo. It’s a new $6000 product recently released from a Japanese company named ZMP. From the article, “I came to understand that for all their purported helpfulness, home robots are largely about companionship.”

July 13, 2005

A certain documentary filmmaker who reads GTxA pointed out to me that the first issue of The Escapist is out. I don’t tend to be a big reader of PDF-based zines, but the “cover” of this one lured me in, and hey, there’s some interesting writing in here.

The magazine “covers gaming and gamer culture with a progressive editorial style.” An article by Jennifer Buckendorf takes on the stereotypical construction of the gamer as someone who plays FPSs (rather than Everquest or classic games) and who doesn’t pursue other hobbies, such as reading. Kieron Gillen investigates the nature of video game forms, answering those (such as a lawmaker bent on restricting video games) who see the simulation aspect of games as at odds with games being able to express anything. John Tynes argues that controller and display innovations (a la the Nintendo DS) are dead ends in a market where people want to push out the same standard game across as many platforms as possible.

July 12, 2005

I recently had an interesting email from Jim Whitehead, a CS faculty member at UC Santa Cruz (who did a great job chairing the 2004 ACM Hypertext conference).

I’ve developed an undergraduate course teaching the fundamentals of game design for non-programmers, pitched at a general undergraduate audience. It’ll be offered next Winter for the first time…

I’m thinking that in this course it makes sense to have students experience and perform critical analysis on some classic video games, to really take apart what makes them fun, see how they create dramatic tension, and determine how the rule system contributes to the game play. I think it would be best to have students study older games, since they’re generally simpler, and don’t take quite as much game play to experience a larger part of the game. Since the graphics are simpler as well, the games have to focus on game play fundamentals to create a fun experience.

So, here are the questions for you, and for Grand Text Auto (assuming this blog has a “Ask GTA” feature, akin to “Ask Slashdot”).

* Is there any consensus on the canon of best games for, say, the Nintendo Entertainment System (or any other older platform for that matter)? Mario Bros. and Zelda seem like shoo-ins, but are there others? Castlevania? Ys?

July 9, 2005

This past week, an incredible group of women met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London as part of the workshop/talks in the Cybersalon series put on by London’s SMARTlab and the ICA. The participant’s backgrounds spanned disciplines from game design to mobile technology design to arts activism to organizational collaboration. To fuel the discussion, speakers (including yours truely) were asked to choose their favourite misused word in technology-culture and speak about it.

July 8, 2005

On GTxA we’ve already seen IKEA as adventure game — you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike — but once you make it out of the maze and you’re packing the trunk of your car with your acquired inventory to head home, how about a mini-game of IKEA Tetris?

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July 7, 2005

The creators of the free documentarty Gamer Br (GTxA post,English home page) are gearing up for another project: a three-episode video on the way digital technology is influencing cultrual production, and the distribution and reception of media, in Brazil. The first, “Skip the Intermediary,” will cover the struggles of musicians and record labels. The second will cover the IP revolution that Creative Commons licenses and other challenges to traditional copyright are bringing in Brazil. The final video will cover the free software movement and its cultural effect.

greetings from London in the middle of all this. London is completely locked down!
I have been here completing my PhD thesis work entitled ‘Playculture’. The work is the first attempt to create a feminist game design methodology through the triad of art practice, critical theory, and activism/intervention.
My viva voce at the SMARTlab on Tuesday 5th July was successful, with esteemed examiners from the US, UK, and Germany! (This is the ‘dissertation defence’ in the British system.) While here have also participated in a Furtherfield / ID Runners workshop on areas of work where art, cultural production, technology, personal development and social action all overlap, and a panel at the ICA (separate post forthcoming). . . lots of excitement!

July 5, 2005

I am extremely pleased to announce the release of Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Façade!

This long-awaited one-act interactive drama, featuring a 3D environment and voice-acted, AI-driven characters, has been a testbed for research in and development of new discourse-based NLP techniques, a new drama management framework, and new ways of allowing behavior hierarchies to interact. It has been the source of more than a dozen academic publications co-authored by Michael and Andrew, as well as Michael’s Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. dissertation. A pre-release version of Façade was a finalist in the 2004 Independent Games Festival. Façade is also delightfully entertaining and abundant in its dramatic and artistic merits. It offers a fairly short dramatic experience that is intensive and compelling, and unlike anything else I have seen in video games or other interactive systems. The New York Times called Façade “the future of video games” and one person who has devoted his life to interactive storytelling, Chris Crawford, said the system was “the best actual working interactive storyworld yet created.” You can read the official press release on Façade, read on for more about the release, or skip directly to the the download page on InteractiveStory.net.